Online Teaching & Learning

Online Delivery

Lecturers are strongly encouraged to use online delivery to supplement classroom delivery. This gives students the freedom to learn from almost anywhere, using tablets, notebooks and phablets. The Gen-Y students are tech-savvy and use such devices frequently, so this will help spur their interest in learning. In addition, online delivery serves as another tool to enable students’ learning, in addition to classroom delivery.

To aid the process of incorporating online delivery, the college has ensured that all lecturers are able to video-record mini-lectures from their own desks. These mini-lectures can then be uploaded online to be shared with the students.

Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

Massive Open Online Courses refer to courses which are offered by many universities world-wide and are free. These courses generally involve lots of students, with class sizes ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of students.

The courses consist mostly of pre-recorded mini lectures, augmented by exercises. Most of them have assessments, which are taken online. Another feature of MOOC is that students actively participate in discussion forums as part of their learning process.

A video of a mini-lecture from a MOOC course, offered by Tokyo University

Many renowned universities are participating in MOOC, and hence, there are a lot of excellent courses being offered. Lecturers are encouraged to promote MOOC to the students, as a way to supplement their course teaching. In addition, lecturers will be interested to also enrol themselves in the relevant courses as a way to expand their own knowledge/skills as well as a way to bench-mark their own teaching.

Some of the prestigious universities offering MOOC include Harvard University, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, University of Chicago, Tokyo University, and Hong Kong University.

A few organizations have been formed to manage the delivery of these courses. The prominent ones are:

1. coursera.org

– the biggest of them all. Offers courses from many universities, including the prestigious ones. Click here to access the website.

– a non-profit organization and founded by the Saylor Foundation. Click here to access the website.

Online Assessments

To complement online delivery, lecturers are encouraged to also implement online assessments. These can take the form of online quizzes. Such quizzes should be created with the view of helping the students learn formatively. That is, the online assessment should incorporate useful feedback to the students, so that they can progressively learn and achieve the intended outcome. Hence, when a student gives an incorrect response to a question, help/guidance should be provided to allow the student to explore and discover the proper answer. This can take the form of pointing out to the student the areas of study (e.g. which chapters) which should be reviewed in order to discover the answer.